Vantaggi
-Former leadership were amazing, inspiring and grounded individuals whom understood the value was in our people! (No longer, see below in Cons).
-The teams are still fantastic, hard working, smart and thoughtful. The people were what made it a great place to be!
-The US Benefits were pretty strong and mostly paid by Akeneo.
-The Boston office was one of the best spaces I have ever had the chance to work in. (No longer there as they moved into a smaller space now as part of cost reduction, which I understand)
-Working with both US and EU teams was a fantastic opportunity for many. This was perhaps one of the best parts of the company to share and gain other perspectives from people around the world.
-Had strong focus on Diversity and Inclusion which was always great to witness. Lots of people from varying backgrounds, cultures, countries etc.
Svantaggi
-Fred stepped down as CEO which frankly was the start of a cultural spiral downward. The new CEO had no sense of how to keep culture strong, why the people were actually the asset (perhaps more than the product), or how to get to profitability in a sustained way through revenue growth versus simply cutting costs, laying off nearly entire teams who were key to our growth and downsizing offices etc. It was clear that in a pursuit to keep his role as CEO, he saw the fastest path was cost reduction and burning the machine down versus actual revenue growth.
-Being a EU based company, while there was much to love, they never understood how America "works", how compensation looks for US employees across Tech, standard practices around annual comp changes in the US etc. Any request for compensation increases even when employees had completely blown away their targets, was always met with a EU bias where it didn't seem acceptable to increase comp based on merit, tenure or cost of living. It was a foreign concept and one that employees would have to fight for year after year only to get little or no increase to their compensation.
-The US team lost key Sales and other GTM leaders either as part of the sweeping layoffs or self-attrition as many started to see the writing on the wall after 1.5 years under a new CEO and the layoffs/cost cutting measures put into place. Akeneo was lost. Seemed a bit rudderless which was a huge shame.
-Akeneo was an amazing place to work, contribute, learn and grow. Unfortunately those glory days are in the rear view mirror at this point. I presume the next step will either be additional profitability measures, a liquidity event, or a change of C-Level leadership to get there.
-Very little opportunity for upward mobility it seems. In my time there, I can count on one hand the number of people in the US who were promoted into higher roles. There were many people who were aspirational for growth, and some were able to attain that, but overall there simply were not many opportunities for advancement.
I must rate the CEO performance as a negative which is unfair as Glassdoor still shows Fred as CEO which he has not been during this period of decline. It's unfair to Fred as he was a great leader. Glassdoor needs to update the CEO as he has now been in seat likely almost 2 years.
